Ken Binmore on whiggery, the left, and the right

Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 1: Playing Fair [chapter 1, section 1.1, pp. 1-7] Ken Binmore 1994

Chapter 1: A Liberal Leviathan

What is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard's eye. W. B. Yeats

1.1 Whiggery
Why write a book like this? My own motivation lies in the conviction that there is a viable and respectable defense for at least some of the liberal ideas that have been contemptuously brushed aside in the last decades of the twentieth century. So thorough is the triumph of conservatism that current newspeak even makes it difficult to use the word liberal without inviting unwelcome associations. Bourgeois liberals like myself find ourselves tarred with the same brush that somehow simultaneously suffices to smear both laissez-faire extremists of the far right and bleeding-heart welfarists of the far left. It therefore seems to me that a case exists for reviving the word whiggery to describe my kind of bourgeois liberalism. Whigs like myself are definitely not in favor of conserving everything as it is. We do not like the immoral society in which we live. We are therefore in favor of reforming it. But the fact that we are not hidebound conservatives does not make us socialists. Nor is whiggery some wishy-washy mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. Indeed, a whig finds such a compromise hard to envisage. How can one find some median position between those who fix their

attention on the wrong problem, and those who do not see that a problem exists? [p. 1] In illustration of this last point, consider the following passage that appeared in the Guardian newspaper of 25 May 1988 during a British general election campaign. Its author, Bryan Gould, was a leading spokesman for the Labour Party. Mrs. Thatcher, whom he quotes verbatim (if somewhat out of context), won the election on behalf of the Conservative Party.
For Mrs. Thatcher, ''There is no such thing as society''. There is only an atomised collection of individuals, each relentlessly pursuing his or her self-interest, some succeeding, some failing, but none recognising any common purpose or responsibility.

This quotation epitomizes the errors of both the left and the right. Both are wrong at a fundamental level because their implicit models of man and society are not realistic about "the nature of human nature". [See Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing (introduction, section 0.2.5, p. 14).] Consider Mrs. Thatcher's denial of the existence of society. This we may charitably interpret as a denial, not of the existence of society per se, but as a denial of the existence of society as interpreted by her opponents of the left. As Bryan Gould is trying to say, the left shares Hobbes' [117] vision of society as being more than just a collection of individuals or households. It is rather a social organism, or as Hobbes would have it, a Leviathan, constructed from but transcending the human beings that form its constituent parts just as human beings are constructed from but transcend the organs that make up their bodies. However, unlike Hobbes, leftists see Leviathan as being moved by a "common will" or motivated towards a "common good" to which the strivings and aspirations of its constituent human parts are properly to be subordinated.

Left or Right? I believe that Mrs. Thatcher was right to reject the leftist Leviathan as a model of what society is or could be. A view of human society that sees Leviathan simply as an individual on a giant scale, equipped with aims and preferences like those of an individual but written large, would seem to place man in the wrong phylum. Perhaps our societies would work better if we shared the genetic arrangements of the hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, etc.), or if the looser genetic ties that link members of human families extended across society as a whole, so that rhetoric about all men being brothers were actually true in more than a metaphorical sense. But this is not the case, and all that can be expected from "reforms" based on such misconceptions about the human condition is that they will fall apart in the long run, leaving behind a sense of disillusionment and a distaste for reformists and for reform in general. Indeed, is not this precisely what we have witnessed in recent years? Even as I wrote this book, the seemingly monolithic Soviet empire at last collapsed under the weight of [p. 2] its own contradictions and old-time conservatives have emerged from the backwoods to rejoice at the fall of socialism.1 The truth about society is much more complex than either the left or the right is willing to admit. As that most conservative of Whigs, Edmund Burke [142, p. 99], so aptly explains:
A nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregration, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well in numbers and in space ... it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and
When such reactionaries learn anything from history, they always learn the wrong lesson. What we have witnessed is not the triumph of the free market economy over socialism. Only rarely in the Western democracies does the allocation of goods and services approach the ideal of a perfectly competitive market. We are all welfare states nowand where "free" markets do operate, their institutions are often badly corrupt. Nor did the Soviet empire that fell come close to the socialist ideal. What we learn from its fall is only what George Orwell's [198] Animal Farm taught us years ago. Institutions that do not recognize that their officers' incentives are not consistent with the goals of the institution will necessarily be corrupted in the long run. Rather than rejoicing at the fall of socialism, we would do better to look to the motes in our own eyes.
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social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time.

However, a conservative avatar like Mrs. Thatcher sees no reason to consider such a sophisticated Leviathan. For those like her, a rejection of the naive Leviathan of the left is a rejection of all Leviathans. This is the fundamental error of the right. It may be true that to speak of the common will or of the common good is to reify the nonexistent, but there are other nouns to which the adjective "common" can sensibly be attached. In particular, nobody is likely to complain that we are reifying the nonexistent in speaking of common understandings or conventions in society. A conservative may feel that to concede this is to concede little of importance. No doubt common understandings exist, but surely they are too fragile and ephemeral to be other than peripheral to the way society operates? Along with many others, I think this view is badly mistaken.2 Far from being peripheral to society, such common understandings constitute the very warp and weft from which society is woven. Leviathan is more than the sum of its parts precisely because of the commonly understood conventions stored in the brains of its citizens and for no other reason. [See Natural Justice (chapter 1, section 1.3, pp. 3-5).] It is hopeless to think of convincing those on the far right of such a proposition. They prefer to wear blinders rather than admit that society is based on such a seemingly precarious foundation. Certain conventional arrangements, particularly those concerned with private morality and the [p. 3] preservation and transference of property rights, they recognize; but not as artificial constructs shaped by social evolution or human ingenuity. They dimly perceive such matters as being determined by some absolute standard of "right" and

Among modern writers, particular mention should be made of Schelling [229], Lewis [152], Ulmann-Margalit [262], and Sugden [254], but the general contention is that of Hume [128].
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"wrong" and hence as immune to change. Other conventional arrangements that they cannot ignore, they are anxious to sweep away in favor of the marketer whose intrinsic "rightness'' as a distributive mechanism they will tolerate no doubts. But this book is not directed at conservatives from the backwoods. It is a piece of rhetoric aimed at open-minded conservatives. Those of us who live in bourgeois comfort need to be continually reminding ourselves that Nature has not provided us with any warranties for the continuation of our cozy way of life. All that stands between us and anarchy are the ideas that people carry around in their heads. Our property, our freedom, our personal safety are not ours because Nature ordained it so. We are able to hang on to them, insofar as we do, only because of the forbearance of others. Or to say the same thing a little more carefully: given society's currently dominant but precarious system of conventions, we continue in the enjoyment of our creature comforts simply because nobody with the power to do so has a sufficient incentive to deprive us of them. Or, at least, not right now. Such a bleak view of the way things are is admittedly simplistic. But is it so very far from the truth? If you doubt it, drive downtown to your local ghetto and watch what goes on when a community's common history and experience fill people's heads with a set of conventions and customs that are very different from your own. Or read a newspaper report about those countries in which the old common understandings have broken down and new common understandings have yet to emerge. In any case, it does not seem to me that the conservative thinker to whom this book is addressed can consistently seek to categorize human behavior in terms of enlightened self-interest and simultaneously paint a more rosy picture of how society holds together.

Nobody would claim that the current systems of commonly understood conventions that regulate life in the major societies of the West are ideal. It would be nice, for example, if one could take the dog for a walk in the park without fear of being mugged. Or if one did not have to be apprehensive about AIDS and the drug scene when a teenage child is late coming home. And so on. These are examples of problems that a whig traces to the existence of injustices and inequalities in the structure of society. There is, of course, no shortage of other problems. It would be pleasant if the air we breathe and the food we eat were unpolluted. Or if we were not at risk from war, nuclear or otherwise. Or if our taxes were not squandered so flamboyantly. But it is problems of justice and inequality that will be central to this book. [p. 4] Reform. What is proposed is very moderate. Indeed, it is so moderate that no conservative need fear becoming tainted in trying on the ideas for size. Marxists, on the other hand, will have nothing but contempt for such bourgeois proposals. For progress to be made, it is necessary for the affluent to understand that their freedom to enjoy what their "property rights" supposedly secure is actually contingent on the willingness of the less affluent to recognize such "rights". It is not ordained that things must be the way they are. The common understandings that govern current behavior are constructs and what has been constructed can be reconstructed. If the affluent are willing to surrender some of their relative advantages in return for a more secure environment in which to enjoy those which remain, or in order to generate a larger social cake for division, then everybody can gain. To quote Edmund Burke [142, p. 96] again:
Early reformations are amicable arrangements with a friend in power; late reformations ... are made under a state of inflammation. In that state of things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable. They see the abuse, and they will see nothing else ... they abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.

People like Edmund Burke, who propose reform with the primary objective of conserving what they can of the past, have been called reforming conservatives. They are to be contrasted with conservative reformers like myself, who actively wish to reform the society in which they live, but are conservative in the reforms they propose because they see no point in creating a society that is unstable. However, both reforming conservatives and conservative reformers are whigs in that they hope to create institutions that will organize trade-offs between different sections of society, so that the system of common understandings that form the fabric of our society can be continually reformed in directions which everyone involved agrees are better. A conservative who is suspicious of reform may argue that social evolution does this for us already. But, as Edmund Burke would have been the first to explain, conservatives did not need to wait to observe city blocks being burned to the ground before deciding that more in the way of black emancipation was required. As the adage has it: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. [See Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing (introduction, section 0.2.3, pp. 6-8); Natural Justice (chapter 1, section 1.7, pp. 18-19; chapter 12, section 12.6, pp. 195-197).] Social Contracts. It will perhaps now begin to be clear what I have in mind in practical terms when speaking of a "social contract". However, this book is not about practical matters. It is an attempt to provide some logical underpinnings for the species of bourgeois liberalism that I am calling whiggery. Such logical underpinnings are to be found in the theory of [p. 5] games. When translated into this language, what I have been saying so far about whiggery goes something like this. We are all players in the game of life, with divergent aims and aspirations that make conflict inevitable. In a healthy society, a balance between these differing aims and aspirations is achieved so that the benefits of cooperation are not entirely lost in internecine strife. Game theorists call such a balance an equilibrium. Sustaining such equilibria requires

the existence of commonly understood conventions about how behavior is to be coordinated. It is such a system of coordinating conventions that I shall identify with a social contract. Whigs argue that it is sensible to look at the whole class of social contracts that are feasible for a society, and to consider whether one of these may not be an improvement on our current social contract. Left-wing socialists agree that what we have now could do with being reformed, but do not understand that there is a feasibility constraint. They therefore propose social contracts that are unworkable because they call for behavior that is not in equilibrium. The utopias they envisage are therefore unstable. Right-wing conservatives understand the need for stability only too well, although they often forget that what was stable yesterday need not be stable today. However, in concentrating on the need to sustain our current social contract, they lose sight of the opportunity to select a better equilibrium from the many available. In saying these things, I am conscious that the risk of being misunderstood is very great, but there is no point in trying to elaborate my position at this stage. What I shall do instead is to reiterate it using the lines of verse from Yeats at the head of the chapter as a text. Yeats is right that whigs worship rationality. They believe that the way to a better society lies in appealing to the enlightened self-interest of all concerned. Yeats is also right that whigs are levelers, and if this seems rancorous to upreconstructed Tories like Yeats, it is because they do not see what is in the best long-run interests of people like themselves. Yeats also tells us that whigs are not saints. He is right about this also. Not only are whigs not saints, they do not think that most of us have the potential to become saints, as the more naive thinkers of the left would have us suppose. People might be temporarily persuaded to put the "interests of the community" ahead of their own selfish

concerns. But a community based on the assumption that its citizens can be relied upon to behave unselfishly much of the time simply will not work. Finally, Yeats is right that whigs see no reason to behave like drunkards lurching from crisis to crisis. Planning and reform need not be dirty words. They do not require the existence of a mythical "common interest". We can plan to institutionalize new "common understandings". Nobody need make great sacrifices in the process once it is understood that it is not in the self-interest of the ''strong" that they always let the ''weak" go to the wall. We can go from the old to the [p. 6] new by mutual consent. We do not need to set up stultifying and inefficient bureaucracies along the way. Nothing prevents our planning to use markets wherever markets are appropriate, but a society that relies only on market institutions is a society that is leaving much of its potential unfulfilled. What is being described is a bourgeois conception of a liberal society. One should therefore not expect it to lead to some kind of utopia. Utopias are typically founded on misconceptions about human nature and hence are doomed to fail. Nor does there seem much point in adopting a point of view that evaluates what we have now by comparing it to such ideal but unattainable societies.3 All that can be achieved by so doing is to distract attention from improvements that actually are feasible. [p. 7]

Or, worse still, in allowing our foreign policy to be guided by such an attitude. A reform that was successful in one society need not be successful in another societyi.e. what proved to be feasible here need not be feasible elsewhere. In particular, it is far from obvious that we act in our own best interests if we unthinkingly seek to remodel our neighbors in our own image. Reforms need to be tailored to the system of common understandings that currently operate in a society: not to those which once operated in our own society.
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Natural Justice [chapter 12, section 12.2, pp. 1-7] Ken Binmore 2005

Chapter 12: Planned Decentralization

12.2 Whiggery
History. The Whigs were originally a British political party that arose in opposition to the Tories of the seventeenth century. The modern Conservative party is a direct descendant of the Tories. The Whigs were eventually outflanked by the [p. 187] modern Labour party, and squeezed into insignificance. Their remnants survived as the Liberal party, which now continues in a revived form as the Liberal Democratic party. However, in recent years, Labour has perhaps become even more whiggish than the Liberal Democrats. What did the Tories and the Whigs represent? Etymology doesn't help, since a Tory was originally an Irish bogtrotter, and a Whig a Scottish covenanter. Nor does it assist to observe that Edmund Burke was the Whig credited with being the founder of modern conservatism; nor that David Hume, whose ideas are the inspiration for my own brand of whiggery, was held to be a Tory by his contemporaries, since he famously confessed himself able to shed a tear for the beheaded Charles I. It is more informative to observe that the Whigs are traditionally associated with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic and authoritarian James II was expelled in favor of the Protestant and constitutionally minded William III. American history also boasts a Whig party, broadly similar in character to its British counterpart. It was vocal in its opposition to Andrew Jackson's authoritarian innovations in the use of the presidential veto. Before joining the

newly emergent Republican party, Abraham Lincoln was a Whig. But the true flowering of whiggery in America came earlier with the founding of the Republic, which whigs see as a triumphant continuation of an ongoing war for justice and liberty in which the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were earlier battles. Like James Madison, modern whigs believe that justice has ever been and ever will be pursued until it is obtained, or liberty lost in the pursuit. A mature free society must therefore necessarily be a fair society. But the world has moved on from the times of the founding fathers. Their great experiment in constitutional design was a huge success, but like all social constructs it needs to be constantly overhauled in the face of newly emerging challenges to justice and liberty. Our task today is therefore to rethink the thoughts of the founding fathers of the American Republic as they would be urging us to rethink them if they were alive today. Classifying Political Attitudes. The big issues for a society are liberty and justice. It is therefore natural to propose a two-dimensional classification of political theories that takes these ideas as basic. It is surely no accident that the psychologist Eysenck found that the data he used in matching personality types with political attitudes fits much more comfortably into such a scheme than the classical one-dimensional political spectrum between left and right. Figure 32 uses freedom and fairness axes to distinguish four regions that I could untendentiously have labeled unplanned centralization, unplanned decentralization, planned decentralization, and planned centralization. But the language of economics is so dismally dull that I have translated these terms into neofeudalism, libertarianism, whiggery, and utilitarianism. In terms of the traditional left-right political spectrum, utilitarianism sits out on the socialist left and libertarianism sits out on the capitalist right. The same dichotomy

appears in moral philosophy as a split between the consequentialist followers of the Good and the deontological followers of the Right. However, far from seeing our problems of political organization as a battle between [p. 188] the ideals of the left and right, I see utilitarianism and libertarianism as the Scylla and Charybdis between which reformers must steer a course if we are to escape our feudal past. Utilitarianism provides no safe port of call, because nothing can prevent the bosses in an authoritarian society from becoming acquisitive. Libertarianism is similarly unsafe, because possessions cannot be held securely in an anarchic society. Those who advocate abandoning all social mechanisms other than the market simply fail to see that they would thereby be throwing away the foundations on which the market mechanism is based.

Figure 32: Classifying political attitudes.

The unworkable utopias of both utilitarians and libertarians therefore have no more relevance to genuine human concerns than the metaphysical disputes on the properties of Absolute Morality that divide those who worship the Good from those who honor the Right. Just as we have to assimilate the issues that trouble consequentialists and deontologists into a single theory of the seemly before we can say anything compatible with what evolution has made of human nature, so we have to separate the feasible from the infeasible in the aspirations of utilitarians and libertarians before abandoning the possibility that they may have some common ground on which to stand. The opposition that I think should supersede the sterile and outdated dispute between left and right contrasts free societies in which fairness is used to coordinate collective decisions with societies that delegate such decisions to individuals or elites. I use the term neofeudal to describe the latter kind of social contract. In brief, we need to cease thinking outdated thoughts about where we would like to locate society on a left-right spectrum. Choosing between utilitarianism and libertarianism makes as much sense as debating whether griffins make better pets than unicorns. We need to start thinking instead about how to move in the orthogonal direction that leads from neofeudalism to whiggery. [See Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing (chapter 4, section 4.10.2, pp. 503-506; chapter 4, section 4.8, pp. 471-476; chapter 3, section 3.4.5, pp. 337-338; chapter 2, section 2.2.7, pp. 164-167).]

Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing [chapter 4, section 4.10.2, pp. 503-506] Ken Binmore 1998

Chapter 4: Yearning for Utopia

4.10 A Perfect Commonwealth?
4.10.2 Where is Whiggery?
The anthropology literature on hunter-gatherer societies surveyed in Section 4.5 uses the word ''egalitarian'' in a broad sense to include both widespread sharing of resources and freedom from authority. But I guess nobody would maintain that there is any necessary linkage between the two notions. Indeed, my own theory suggests that one might usefully classify social contracts, both real and hypothetical, using the two-dimensional scheme of Figure 4.16(a), in which freedom from coercion and equality of resources appear on orthogonal axes. It is perhaps no accident that the psychologist Eysenck [177] found that the data obtained from attempting to match personality types with political attitudes fits much more comfortably into such a scheme than the classical one-dimensional political spectrum between left and right. Figure 4.16(b) attempts to place some of the great names of political philosophy within a similar scheme. With neofeudalism appearing prominently in Figure 4.16(a), followers of Marx might reasonably expect to see variants of capitalism and socialism appearing also. It is not hard to place the idealized form of capitalism in [p. 503] which all social interaction is supposedly transacted through the market in the libertarian category. Nor is it difficult to place the idealized form of socialism in which state officials love the powerless as much as they love themselves in the

utilitarian category. But what of communism as once practiced in the Soviet Union, or the mixed economies of the West?

Figure 4.16: Classifying political attitudes.

Unlike Marx, I don't think we ever graduated from the hierarchical authority systems that typify feudal societies. We simply found new feudal forms to practice. The forms of socialism and capitalism that have been practiced in the world therefore all belong in the neofeudal category. After all, who were the officials of the Soviet Communist Party if not a self-appointed aristocracy? What more does a modern democracy offer than the periodic opportunity to replace one bunch of oligarchs with another? Who is the president of the United States if not an elected monarch? Far from seeing the problems of political organization we face as a battle between the ideals of the left and right, I see utilitarianism and libertarianism as the Scylla and Charybdis between which reformers must steer a course if we are to escape our feudal past. Scylla provides no safe port of call, because nothing can prevent the bosses in an authoritarian society from becoming acquisitive. Charybdis is similarly unsafe, because possessions [p. 504] cannot be held

securely in an anarchic society. Our choice is between neofeudalism and whiggery. As Section 3.4.5 explains, the distinction between neofeudalism and whiggery is one of degree. Elite groups that blatantly ignore the standards of fairness currently operating in their societies merely destabilize their own regimes (Balandier [39]). On the other hand, no society can dispense with the need for leaders and entrepreneurs to handle decisions that need to be made quickly, and to seek out new opportunities to exploit. Even the most egalitarian of modern foraging societies take advice from their more successful hunters on how hunts should be organized, while the indigenous tribes of the Great Plains of North America understood the necessity of granting temporary authority to war chiefs.76 I believe the reason that romantic authors see such savage societies as noble has little to do with the reasons proposed by Rousseau for admiring the noble savage. The lifestyle of hunter-gatherers strikes a chord in our hearts because they do not need to suppress the instincts that make us resentful of the unfair exercise of personal authority. By contrast, as argued in Section 4.5, we occupy what Maryanski and Turner [343] call a social cage, constructed by our ancestors when population pressures forced them to adopt a farming lifestyle. The bars of this cage mark the front line of an ongoing war between two forms of social contract, those in which equilibria in the Game of Life are chosen using fairness as a coordinating mechanism, and those in which equilibrium selection is delegated to leaders. Perhaps the distant future will see technological advances that free us altogether from our neofeudal social cage, but only the most utopian of anarchists would wish to argue that a large modern society can survive without
76

Like Cincinnati's, they served only for the duration of the emergency.

putting power into the hands of its officials. We cannot dispense with the need for a human police force and a codified punishment system. While we have militant neighbors, an army is necessary to defend our freedoms. Taxes need to be raised and administered. Nor does the evidence suggest that we are capable of exploiting the returns to scale possible in large commercial or industrial enterprises without bosses to direct our efforts. Without leaders and entrepreneurs, the social contract in a large society cannot possibly come close to the Pareto-frontier of the feasible set. There is nothing we can do to alter the fact that Pareto-efficient social contracts in large societies must be authoritarian to some extent. Nor can we rewrite the history of a society with a view to changing the standards of fairness it has inherited from the past. But, like the founding fathers of the American Republic, we can attempt to persuade our fellow citizens not to waste the opportunities for reforming our social contract as new [p. 505] opportunities for Pareto-improvements arise. The whig proposal is that we select whichever of the Pareto-efficient contracts in our current feasible set is fairest according to current thinking. Whigs who yearn for utopia therefore propose steering a course away from neofeudalism, heeding the siren songs of neither the utilitarian left nor the libertarian right, toward the noble savagery of our foraging ancestors. On the way, we will give up the unnatural habits of authority worship and conspicuous consumption that currently keep us locked in our social cage. There will still be bosses in Ithaca, but they will be seen for what they then will be people like ourselves, who are paid to help us coordinate on a fair and Pareto-efficient social contract. [p. 506]

Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing [chapter 4, section 4.8, pp. 471-473] Ken Binmore 1998

4.8 The Market and the Long Run

If Hobbes' Leviathan represents his idea of a just polity, in which individual citizens coordinate their efforts like the cells in a healthy body, then the anarchic history of the British civil war he recounts in Behemoth seems an appropriate metaphor for the operation of the free market.58 No hand, invisible or otherwise, directs the traders on the floor of the Chicago wheat market as they scream and shout and throw their arms in the air. But the sum of their actions takes prices to their market-clearing values with amazing rapidity. The manner in which order springs spontaneously from chaos in such circumstances has led to the market being used as a general metaphor for selforganizing social mechanisms that operate without the intervention of any central authority.59 So compelling is the metaphor that it has led a generation of right-wing thinkers to overlook the fact that it is only a metaphor. The mistake is then made of seeing all self-organizing social phenomena as markets whose failings must necessarily be treated with the same medicine that one would
58 What's the market? A place, according to Anacharsis, wherein they cozen one another, a trap; nay, what's the world itself? A vast chaos, a confusion of manners, as fickle as the air, a crazy house, a turbulent troop full of impurities, a mart of walking spirits, goblins, the theatre of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, flattery, a nursery of villainy, the scene of babbling, the school of giddiness, the academy of vice; a warfare where, willing or unwilling, one must fight and either conquer or succumb, in which kill or be killed; wherein every man is for himself, his private ends, and stands upon his own guard. Burton's [110] Anatomy of Melancholy. 59 Hayek [241, 242] is commonly credited by libertarian thinkers with having freed political philosophy from the social contract tradition by inventing the revolutionary concept of spontaneous order. But the notion goes back at least as far as Lucretius [335], and must surely have been familiar to Hayek from the works of Hume [267] and Darwin [145]. Nor does the fact that a political philosopher makes use of a contractarian metaphor imply that he believes that our societies were planned by ancient social architects. One might as well argue that Adam Smith's use of the metaphor of an invisible hand implies that he believed in the real existence of the fictional auctioneer of neoclassical economics! In my theory, the social contract is similarly a metaphor for the spontaneous order generated in a society by the action of biological and cultural evolution.

apply to an ailing market. Coase [128] even proposes modeling the propagation of knowledge as a market in ideas! The most dangerous version of this mistake occurs when the market is proposed as a model of the way an ideal society should work, with the role of government reduced to providing public goods and internalizing externalities. I agree that part of the role of a government can usefully play is to extend the range of available goods and to assist in the creation of new markets, but to see a government only in such terms is to wear blinders. Aside from other considerations, it seems obvious that the existence of [p. 471] a well-developed social contract is a precondition for the emergence of a market. Even the notion of a private good would not be meaningful in the absence of some of the common understandings built into our culture that right-wing thinkers insist should be envisaged as public goods. The idea that law and order is something that can be measured adequately only in terms of the amount spent by government on its enforcement has proved particularly disastrous. Nor does it seem particularly useful to assess social institutions in terms of how far they are forced to deviate from market ideals by transaction costs that would be zero in the case of perfect competition. Indeed, the Coasian vision of the world as a perfectly competitive arena, marred by occasional patches where the market model does not apply, because transaction costs become prohibitive, seems to me like a photographic negative. Our arena is the Game of Life, which is played according to market rules only in a very restricted set of circumstances. To deny the universality of the market model is not to overlook the fact that markets often provide a flexible and robust tool for the efficient distribution of resources. Nor is there any doubt that Coase was right to emphasize the importance of assigning property rights unambiguously when

the market mechanism is applied in a new context. But setting up a market is only one of many ways we can plan to allocate resources. Whigs like myself are at one with marketeers in our suspicion of command structures administered by armies of bureaucrats whose selfless devotion to the service of the community is a precondition of the system's successful operation. However, markets are not the only alternative to the type of command economy advocated by old-time socialists. Nor are capitalist economies at all closely modeled by the paradigm of perfect competition. Many different kinds of socioeconomic organization are in use, and new types are being experimented with all the time. Indeed, part of the reason for the success of game theory is that it provides a language that can be used to describe such structures as they evolve. If we are sufficiently clever, we may even learn to use the freedom of thought offered by the language of game theory to escape the false dichotomy perceived by traditionalists on both the left and the right. We do not need to choose between the market and a command economy. It is not necessary for the left to deny that a stable society needs to allocate resources efficiently, and that decisions must therefore be decentralized to the level where the relevant information resides. Nor need the right pretend not to notice that a stable society must plan to allocate resources fairly lest those who find themselves unjustly treated seek violent or criminal redress. The subject of mechanism design suggests that it may be possible to have things both ways by using game-theoretic ideas on a grand scale. In such a [p. 472] vision of the future, the virtues of the market would be retained by leaving decisions to be made by the people on the spot, but with their behavior constrained by rules selected to provide incentives that make it optimal for decision makers to choose in accordance with an agreed plan. [] [p. 473] [See Natural Justice (chapter 11, section 11.9, pp. 183-184).]

References
Binmore, K. (1994). Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 1: Playing Fair. Cambridge: MIT Press. http://books.google.com.co/books?id=8cDiGo2REBIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false Binmore, K. (1998). Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2: Just Playing. Cambridge: MIT Press. http://books.google.com.co/books?id=HZ1hC1MLPeoC&lpg=PP1&dq=Game%20Theory%20and %20the%20Social%20Contract%20Just%20Playing&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Game%20Theory%2 0and%20the%20Social%20Contract%20Just%20Playing&f=false Binmore, K. (2005). Natural Justice. Oxford: OUP. http://books.google.com.co/books?id=vV1PuLVl_vsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Brief overviews of Binmores evolutionary theory of fairness:

Binmore, K. (2009). Fairness as a Natural Phenomenon: http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/332.pdf Binmore, K. (2007). The Origins of Fair Play: http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/267.pdf Binmore, K. (2006). Justice as a Natural Phenomenon: http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-1/AK_Binmore_2006.pdf http://analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-1/inhalt.htm Ken Binmore | Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution (ELSE) | Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) | University College London: http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/newweb/displayProfile.php?key=2